Talking Points

Inside the Nokia Theatre at the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards held on August 25, host Seth Meyers keenly observed that agents habitually tell their clients, "You are crushing it right now" or "Just killing it, buddy."

Some insurance companies are canceling policies, so therefore our president must have lied. Nope. Not true. It is a handy talking point for the opposition, but it is in fact, just another logical fallacy. Once you start listening for them, you'll find them everywhere.

If there was some underlying "cut deficits" strategy to the Republican shutdown, then why would the House have passed a budget bill on the brink of the shutdown which increased the debt by $29 billion?

Twenty-eight years ago I began my first experiment in what I call conversational intelligence. I was hired by Union Carbide to work with 17 high-powered sales executives in danger of losing a bid for a key contract.

A Tea Party group known as FreedomWorks has provided new GOP congressmen and women with talking points that will help them survive budget-focused town hall meetings which have recently been very confrontational for conservatives.

What's happening in Wisconsin isn't about budget deficits or government spending or even public employee benefits. It's class war, wherein the big business, conservative Right tries to pit working class Americans against one another.

Congratulations media, you've had a very successful couple of weeks. Your control over the public discourse is strong. So don't blow the whole operation and have everybody actually engaged in civics -- Western Civilization would collapse.

Thursday's health care summit could have been dubbed Talking Points-Palooza. The GOP stayed ferociously on message, with speaker after speaker calling on the president to "start over" with a "clean sheet of paper" and take a "step-by-step approach." For their part, Democrats were committed to sending the message that, as Max Baucus put it, "We're really not that far apart." That might be the case -- if Republicans were actually interested in coming to an agreement. But they're not -- as the last 14 months have made abundantly clear. No matter how many conciliatory steps Democrats take in their direction, Republicans just keep backing away. President Obama will announce his plan for moving forward this week. Let's hope he scraps his delusions of bipartisan agreement, and pushes Congressional Democrats to beef up the bill and pass it through reconciliation.

I recognize I'm not going to convince all of you to become single-payer supporters through a post here. I've learned to live with that. We will disagree as to the best solutions. But can we at least agree that there is a problem?